A Look Inside

Before reading this page we strongly suggest to take a look at this article, which will help you understand the internal components of a PSU much better.


The OEM of the PSU is Super Flower and an LLC resonant topology is used to achieve Gold level efficiency. As you can see in the above pictures there are no toroidal coils in the secondary side, since this topology does not require any.


The first stage of the transient filter starts, as usual, at the AC receptacle and consists of one X and two Y capacitors and a coil. It continues to the main PCB with one X, two Y caps and a coil. Unfortunately, although there is room for it, no MOV (Metal Oxide Varistor) is available. A very serious omission that leaves the PSU and consequently the whole system unprotected from spikes coming from the power grid. The single bridge rectifier is sandwiched between two heatsinks.


In the APFC stage two IPW60R125CP are used along with a boost diode. Also two parallel capacitors are used for smoothing/energy reservoir purposes. They are provided by Nippon Chemi-Con (KMQ series, 105°C, 330μF, 400V). Near the middle capacitor resides an electromagnetic relay along with a thermistor that provides protection against large inrush currents. The relay bypasses the thermistor, to save energy and allow its fast cool-down, once the PSU starts and the APFC capacitors are fully charged. The PFC controller is an NCP1653A IC which is housed on a vertical daughter-board right next to the PFC choke. As primary switches we find two IPW50R140P mosfets.


The LLC resonant controller for the primary switches is on a daughter-board residing in the secondary side. Its model number is SF29601 and we didn't find any bibliography about this IC on the net. Besides the role of LLC resonant controller it must do some house keeping too (meaning it incorporates some of the PSU's protections) because on the rear side of the same daughter-board we found an LM324 quad operation amplifier.


The 5VSB rail is filtered by a Nippon Chemi-Con cap (KZE series, 105°C) and the standby PWM controller is an ICE3B0565.


In the secondary side synchronous design is used for the generation of +12V, so six IPP040N06N3 are used. The minor rails are generated through +12V with the help of two DC-DC VRMs (Voltage regulation Modules). All capacitors, polymer and electrolytic ones, in the secondary are from Chemi-Con. Finally, on the secondary heatsink there is a thermistor attached, for the fan speed control.


Behind the modular PCB there are three electrolytic caps, clearly hand-soldered afterwards, that provide some extra ripple filtering. Soldering quality and workmanship on the main PCB are good but not top notch.


The cooling fan carries an NZXT label so we couldn't spot the real manufacturer.